London School of Economics: Public lectures and events

Speaker(s): Lord Malloch-Brown | Ryszard Kapuscinski exposed the follies of Africa’s rulers and officials while showing an intense emotional identification with the continent’s people. Would he see the current state of Africa as a further triumph of the elites or the redemptive emergence of a more just continent? Mark Malloch-Brown is a former UN deputy secretary-general and was head of the UN Development Programme. He is the author of The Unfinished Global Revolution.

Speaker(s): Professor Hanspeter Kriesi | Professor Kriesi will explore the reactions of Europe’s citizens to the Great Recession, and how the political and economic context is shaping the aftermath of the crisis. Hanspeter Kriesi holds the Stein Rokkan Chair of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute.

Speaker(s): Dr Bonnie Ayodele, Professor Zhongying Pang | As Africa-China ties have grown tighter in the past few years, China’s engagement with the continent has evolved from being mostly economically focused to more sensitive socio-political fields. This talk provides in-depth discussion of African security issues in relation to China’s long-held non-interference policy. Bonnie Ayodele is lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ado Ekiti, Nigeria. Zhongying Pang is professor of international and global affairs at Renmin University of China.

Speaker(s): Professor James Jasper | On those rare occasions when democracy has emerged in history, emotions have been used to define who is a full citizen. Can a new vision of emotions help us protect, repair, and extend democracy rather than curtailing it?James Jasper is professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Speaker(s): Dr Rabah Aissaoui | In colonial Algeria, the social, ethnic and religious dividing lines of colonial society remained marked in the interwar period, and the political tensions that traditionally characterised the colonial relationship became particularly acute in the context of the rise of Algerian nationalism during the 1930s. The emergence of Algerian nationalist activism during that period coincided with the celebrations marking the apogee of the French colonial empire.This presentation seeks to examine some key developments in the political mobilisation of Algerians prior to the Second World War and how the French colonial authorities and more specifically the French security services responded to the political situation in Algeria by implementing a number of changes to the intelligence gathering process, changes that were marked by internal conflicts and tensions.Dr Rabah Assaoui is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leicester.Dr Aissaoui’s research interests focus on immigration and racism in colonial and postcolonial France. He is particularly interested in the study of discourses on identity and exile, in the diasporic construction of nationalism and more specifically in expressions of ethnic, national and cultural belonging amongst Maghrebi migrants in France.

Speaker(s): Otto Dov Kulka, Sir Ian Kershaw | In this event Otto Dov Kulka will discuss his new book Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination in conversation with historian Sir Ian Kershaw.Auschwitz is for Otto Dov Kulka a vast repository of images, memories, and reveries: “the Metropolis of Death” over which rules the immutable Law of Death. Amidst so much death Kulka finds moments of haunting, almost unbearable beauty (for beauty, too, says Kulka, is an inescapable law). But what does it mean to find beauty in Auschwitz? For him, “the blue of the sky in this land is many times stronger than any blue one can see anywhere else.”Kulka here breaks years of silence, bringing together the personal and historical in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps. Returning to the sites of his childhood, Kulka struggles to overcome the obfuscations of memory, unpick the euphemistic language of the camp, and interpret history as he experienced it. These haunting memories – of his mother, who doesn’t look back as she marches towards her death, the sounds of ‘Ode to Joy’ being sung by a children’s choir opposite the crematoria, and the “black stains” along the roadside during the winter death march - instigate forbidden, unanswerable questions. As the author maps his interior world, in a way reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, readers gain a new sense of what it was to experience the Shoah from inside the camps— both at the time, and long afterward.A renowned historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Otto Dov Kulka is Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1933. As a child, he was sent first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. As one of the few survivors he has spent much of his life studying Nazism and the Holocaust, but always as a discipline requiring the greatest coldness and objectivity, with his personal story set to one side.Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris; Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis; Making Friends with Hitler; and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-4. Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis received the Wolfson History Prize and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize. Until his retirement in 2008, Ian Kershaw was professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. He was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and was the winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2012.

Speaker(s): Dr Joseph Hanlon, Dr Jeanette Manjengwa, Teresa Smart | A discussion with the authors of the new book, Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land which offers a nuanced assessment of land reform, countering the dominant media narratives of oppression and economic stagnation in Zimbabwe.Joseph Hanlon is a visiting senior fellow at the LSE and an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester.Jeanette Manjengwa is deputy director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, Harare.Teresa Smart is a visiting fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Speaker(s): Alexander Jan | LSE London's 2013 Lent term seminar series begins on the 14th of January. Speakers from within and beyond academia will focus on many of the implications of the current economic and political environment for London, covering relevant issues such as the road pricing, UK trends in higher education, census data and localism. Presenters include academics and practitioners from relevant fields.

Speaker(s): Professor Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Professor Dr Paul Lukowicz, Nestor Alfonzo Santamaria | The scientists behind a crowd safety app, and the City of London Police who use the app in emergencies, will discuss the difference it can make to policy-makers and the emergency services.Eve Mitleton-Kelly is director of the Complexity Research Group at LSE and organised the trial of the app.Paul Lukowicz is scientific director at the Embedded Intelligence German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).Nestor Alfonzo Santamaria is the lead in business resilience for the City of London Corporation where he is part of the Security & Contingency Planning Group.The LSE Complexity Group has been working for over 16 years, with organisations in the private and public sectors, and several companies in the aerospace industry, to address practical complex problems. In the process it has developed a theory of complex social systems and an integrated methodology using both qualitative and quantitative tools and methods.LSE Works is a series of public lectures, that will showcase some of the latest research by LSE's Research Centres. In each session, LSE academics will present key research findings, demonstrating where appropriate the implications of their studies for public policy. A list of all the LSE Works lectures can be viewed online.

Speaker(s): Professor Luis Garicano, Professor Wouter Denhaan, Professor Paul de Grauwe, Professor John Van Reenen | It is still possible to find a way out of the Eurozone crisis if policy-makers address two problems: dealing with the legacy costs of the initially flawed design of the Eurozone, and fixing the design itself. Luis Garicano is professor and head of the Managerial Economics and Strategy Group in the LSE’s Department of Management. Francesco Caselli is Norman Sosnow chair in economics at LSE. Wouter Denhaan is professor of economics. Paul de Grauwe is John Paulson chair in European Political Economy and head of European Institute. John Van Reenen is professor of economics and director of CEP.

Speaker(s): Dr Tariq Tell | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor audio quality of this recording. Dr Tell will provide context to contemporary politics in Jordan by examining the history of the emergence and consolidation of the modern state in Jordan under Ottoman, British, and Hashemite rule. He will explorehow the sources of Hashemite social power in Jordon were forged and why they have proven more durable than those fashioned under more auspicious circumstances elsewhere in the Arab east. The talk will focus on the historical political economy of Trans-Jordan and the evolution of a militarized monarchical social pact that exchanged loyalty for economic security and bound the peasants and pastoralists of the East Bank to the throne. This is in contrast to much of what has been written on Hashemite rule in Jordan, which has concentrated on the statecraft of the Hashemite monarchs, or paid prime attention to the dynamics of their policies towards the Palestinian question. Dr Tariq Tell is a political economist currently teaching at the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He has previously taught at the American University in Cairo and the University of Manchester (UK). He has also held research posts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and in Amman at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Moyen Orient Contemporain (CERMOC) and the Royal Scientific Society. Tell has co-edited Village, Steppe and State: The Social Origins of Modern Jordan (I.B. Tauris, 1994) and edited The Resilience of Hashemite Rule: Politics and the State in Jordan before 1967 (Cahier de Cermoc, 2001). His book, The Social and Economic Origins of Monarchy in Jordan will be published by Palgrave in 2013. He has degrees from St. Antony’s College (Oxford University), the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex) and the London School of Economics and Political Science. His current research interests include the comparative history and politics of Arab monarchies and the relationship between imperialism, food security, and popular protest in the Middle East.

Speaker(s): Lucy Scott-Moncrieff | Lucy Scott-Moncrieff will reflect on the disappointing progress of human rights and anti-discrimination law, and consider whether the language we use may be part of the problem. Lucy Scott-Moncrieff is the president of the Law Society and managing partner of Scott-Moncrieff and Associates LLP.

Speaker(s): Professor John Coatsworth | John Coatsworth will talk about the major foreign policy challenges facing the second Obama administration: the decline of international norms and institutions; the drift toward deeper recession in Europe, the obstacles to demilitarization of Middle Eastern policy, the pressures toward militarization of the US “pivot” to East Asia, and the lack of coherent approaches to Africa and Latin America. John Coatsworth is provost and professor of international and public affairs and of history at Columbia University. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago (1969-1992) and at Harvard, where he was Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs (1992-2007) and served as the founding director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (1994-2006). He also chaired the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies. Professor Coatsworth received his degree in History from Wesleyan University and his MA and Ph.D. degrees in Economic History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Speaker(s): Professor Christopher Clark | Few episodes in the history of modern Europe have attracted such intense and lasting historical interest as the July Crisis of 1914. The chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War One still offers one of the most dramatic and intellectually enthralling narratives in modern history. Yet the size and sophistication of the existing secondary literature poses a challenge: how to generate fresh insights into a crisis that has preoccupied historians and generated controversy for nearly a century. This lecture revisits the crisis of 1914, reflects on trends in the recent and older writing on the outbreak of war and examines some new angles of approach. Christopher Clark is professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His principal publications include The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728-1941 (OUP: Oxford, 1995), Kaiser Wilhelm II. A Life in Power (Allen Lane: London, 2009) and (co-edited with Wolfram Kaiser) Culture Wars. Catholic-Secular Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (CUP: Cambridge, 2003) and Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Allen Lane: London, 2006).

Speaker(s): Laurie Penny | Taking in Pussy Riot and the 2011 uprisings, and stretching back to the Paris Commune, a contextual look at how the rage and pride of women is personal, political – and endlessly powerful. Laurie Penny is a journalist, blogger and author. She is currently a columnist and reporter for New Statesman.